Month: September 2025

MSc students reveal the oldest lepidosaur fossil

Posted on by john.cunningham
A reconstruction of the new fossil by Bob Nicholls.

MSc students Dan Marke and Perth Thitiwoot Sethapanichsakul have described a new Middle Triassic fossil from Devon  that represents the oldest member of the lepidosaurs: the group that includes lizards, snakes and the tuatara. The work was published in Nature by Dan and Perth, along with supervisors Mike Benton and David Whiteside, and co-authors Rob Coram, Vincent Fernandez, Alexander Liptak and Elis Newham.

Perth had studied the fossil using conventional CT scanning as part of his MSc project and found fantastic detail. However, as the skull is so tiny – only 1.5 cm long – some of the key features were hard to see. So Dan and his supervisors used synchrotron CT scans to get even finer resolution, using two powerful beamlines at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (France) and the Diamond Light Source (UK).

As well as revealing the oldest lepidosaur, the scans provided new information about feeding in early lepidosaurs and threw light on the initial diversification of the group. You can find out more in the press release or the paper:

Marke, D., Whiteside, D.I., Sethapanichsakul, T. et al. The oldest known lepidosaur and origins of lepidosaur feeding adaptations. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09496-9

Multiple new species of “living fossil” fish found hiding in plain sight

Posted on by mike.benton

Jacob Quinn has published a second paper from his MSc project as part of the Bristol MSc in Palaeobiology. First, he redescribed the little Late Triassic marine reptile Pachystropheus, first named in 1935, and since then reported from many locations. But, while searching the collections across the UK and Germany, Jacob noticed that many of the bones identified as coming from Pachystropheus looked a little fishy.

Reconstruction of a large mawsoniid coelacanth from the British Rhaetian (Artist credit: Daniel Phillips).

It turns out he was right and, after consulting world coelacanth expert Pablo Toriño from the University of Uruguay, confirmed that the supposed reptilian bones were those from coelacanths.

The modern coelacanth is a famous ‘living fossil’, long thought to have died out, but first fished out of deep waters in the Indian Ocean in 1938. Since then, dozens of examples have been found, but their fossil history is patchy. In a new study, Jacob Quinn and colleagues from the University of Bristol and University of Uruguay in Montevideo have identified coelacanths in museum collections that had been missed for 150 years.

The fossils identified in the new work date from the very end of the Triassic Period, some 200 million years ago, when the UK lay at more tropical latitudes.

Jacob’s continuing work from his MSc thesis was published today in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Read the press release here, and the paper here.